PatrickMead.net

If you’ve been reading the Hidden People series since the beginning, you know that I found out my family history only after I became ill with a disease that white men don’t get. The doctor looked at me, his eyes opened wide, and he said, "You’re one of them!" Before I could gather myself to [...]

I miss my son, but I especially miss him today. No, it isn’t so much because he is in boot camp at Parris Island, preparing to be a Marine. It is because of a ritual we used to observe on this day, Memorial Day. My great great grandfather’s name was John Printer Mead. His family [...]

[NOTE: Chapter six has been posted at thenovelproject.patrickmead.net]
 You can’t pick them out of a crowd, but they are there. They are the 1% of the population who have served or are serving in the military. Most of them won’t have a sticker on their car or a flag flying from their home. They’ve let their [...]

The sixth chapter was just posted at thenovelproject.patrickmead.net
More will be posted by this time next week. 

America can be described (as it was by Michael Kolhoff in Anarchy — A Journal of Desire Armed, Issue #52) as a Fugitive Nation. Much of the history taught in school books is either scrubbed to meet some cultural sub-set’s goals — like some books I’ve seen describing the Founding Fathers as if they were [...]

I keep stopping to pray for Duncan as he faces the gas chamber and a second round of pugil stick training today. Your prayers and emails have been very touching — especially when I learned that That Girl gave blood in his name yesterday. What an honor it is to be connected to you.
Now…back to [...]

I made it through the marathon weekend! Your prayers made it much easier than I could have imagined. A recap and report:
The meetings with Dale Hawley went well. They were grueling, but some breakthroughs were achieved. We think of ourselves as a very good church with a very good staff/elder interaction…and that is dangerous. It [...]

We got a third letter from Duncan yesterday! There was much rejoicing in the house. He is doing well. Keep the prayers going. 
This will be a testing weekend for me. I got home from New Jersey yesterday after preaching a series on Spiritual Warfare at the Tabernacle Church of Christ. Today, I’ve already had one [...]

When I spoke, in the last blog, about carnies having their own language, that doesn’t mean that they have a fully developed and separate language. It is more of a cant, in the classic meaning of that word: a set of words, gestures, and signs meant to keep understanding away from potential "marks" or victims. [...]

Ever want to run away to the circus when you were a kid? What about the carnival? Get visions of HBO series out of your head and ignore half of what you hear about them, but the carnies are a different breed of folk. They are not, as many have written, all related somehow. While [...]